I realize this is perhaps not such a good time to be posting this particular poem, given the season (at last fully changed) and the temperature (solid cold in all good northern places), and the images the poem lays out at first. In my defense, I started it a month ago, or something like, when…

Originally posted on ADAPT THAT: Adapt That is thrilled to welcome back guest writer Anna from Between Horizons for today’s post. Anna has been a longtime student of the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, and spends her free time dancing and writing about farm life in the countryside of her native Vermont. I woke up this…

Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks arise Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies? I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes, Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour; And, éyes, heárt,…

You read about the ways the country disappears. The ways the children of a community choose careers over membership because belonging is painful and requires something of you that is more than money, that is a part of yourself, and to give yourself up is a hard thing and it is easier not to reach…

Unfortunately, my poetry seems to be mostly doomed to non-titlement. I get to the end, and I put all the important words in the body of the poem so I have none left to name it with. Oh well. All the famous poets’ works are known by their first line, instead of like a real…

8/23 The slurred dregs of summer run between my cupped fingers, sticky, viscous, the juice of rotting melons and days gone sour. This mucous-thickened murmur, breeze slunk in gummed sulter, trickles bloated on the back of my neck, but I begin at last to understand why you do not like the fall.

I didn’t expect to be at the center of a community like this. We roll up to a farm, and in the space of two hours, we have transformed the back yard, the old cow paddock, the bottom pasture, into a stage. The community turns out to see us, and it is a wonder, yet five hours after we arrived we are gone, and we leave no trace but memories.

Well, it’s certainly been long enough, hasn’t it? My apologies for the complete and utter lack of blogging action, over here, for the past too-many months. I had very good intentions of writing this summer, but I have found that the only thing I am able to put words to right now is the mountains,…

I am driving home, down this long, languid stretch of interstate that seems to grow more miles every time I travel it. The asphalt lies in great curves, snaking up the side of the Green Mountains that divide my state down the middle, looking for a way through from west to east. It’s a long road,…

There are things that I want to say, but I haven’t yet learned how. There are things I want to talk about, write about, think about, that are still somehow strange to me, but that are important, so important, and I don’t know how to approach that. I want to tell you what I am…

It is cold again, and suddenly overnight there is snow on snow on snow, the way I remember it from when I was small and our little blue house would get buried right up to its shiny tin eaves. We’d climb up the drifts and struggle to sit on the edge of the roof. We…

I close my eyes, and it’s like nothing and everything has changed. There, the warmth of the lights from the mirrors. There, the smell of hairspray and sweat and hours of hard work. There, the odd, dusty scent of lipstick, like my mother putting on her best dress for an evening out and little me…